Who are Arizona's independent voters?

Arizona voters have been registering as independents steadily for the past two decades.

Twenty years ago, independents accounted for 12.6 percent of the voter rolls. Today, they are 33 percent.

By fall 2011, their numbers had passed the Democrats. According to the latest figures from the Arizona Secretary of State, they lag Republicans by fewer than 88,000 voters.

There's no tidy label to hang on this ever-growing segment of voters, said Jackie Salit, founder of IndependentVoting.org and author of Independents Rising, a book about this voting bloc.

Independents are diverse, spanning the political spectrum from left to right, she said. But they share the belief that partisanship is hijacking the political process, leading to gridlock.

That disgust with gridlock is what propels some people to re-register as independents, Salit said. Others have been swing voters for a long time, but never bothered to change their registration.

Increasingly, young people register as independents when they reach voting age. They have little respect for the established parties, she said.

In Arizona, independents show scant interest in primary elections, even though state law allows them to vote in partisan primaries as long as they pick a party ballot for that election.

In last month's primary, 8 percent of registered independents voted. They picked the Republican ballot nearly 62 percent of the time, and opted for the Democratic ballot 38 percent of the time. Statewide, fewer than 1 percent of independents voted in the primaries for the Green Party and Americans Elect combined. Americans Elect is a non-profit group that tried tunsuccessfully to nominate a centrist candidate as U.S. president.

This is the first year elections officials have been required to track the ballot preference of independents, and political consultants say it confirms theories that Arizona independents lean Republican. But that may not be entirely accurate - some independents say they choose a particular party's ballot for strategic reasons, such as to vote against a candidate they dislike. In other cases, they opt for a party that has competitive races in their area. For example, the high-profile GOP race for the U.S. Senate nomination might have motivated more independents to pick up a Republican ballot.